Month: July 2015

One of the key factors to the adoption of wearables is their battery life.

We already use laptops, smartphones and tablets that we need to charge almost everyday. Having a wearable device like a smartwatch implies one more device to charge. If our smartphone has a low battery level, we can find a place to charge it while we do some other things. With a smartwatch we need to take it off. We can’t check the time while it is charging, at least not just by looking at our wrist.

Battery life is an important feature that we should consider when choosing a smartwatch, so I have measured the battery drain of the Apple Watch. In this post I want to show the results.

These are the specifications of the Apple Watch that I have used for the tests:

Battery drain

I analyzed the battery drain of the Apple Watch doing a very basic use of it.

This means that I checked the time once in a while and I read some notifications. Nothing more. I didn’t spend time exploring apps from the watch, I didn’t use the maps nor I monitored any type of exercise.
The results indicate that the battery life of the Apple Watch is around 50 hours: a little more than 2 days.
Therefore if you do more actions with the Apple Watch than just simply checking the time or reading notifications, the battery life will be less than 2 days, which means you need to charge it everyday.

The following chart shows the battery drain over time.

Power reserve

When the battery level of the Apple Watch is very low, around 10%, the power reserve mode is started automatically. You can also start this mode in any moment from the Power glance or from the power off menu.

While in the power reserve mode, you can only see the time on the screen along with an icon showing the red battery level icon. The watch doesn’t react to your finger touch and you need to press the physical side button to see the time.

When the Apple Watch is in power reserve, the battery drain is much lower. This can be observed in the next chart, where the power reserve mode was enabled during some hours.

More results

Charging time
It takes around 120 minutes to charge the Apple Watch completely, that is around 2 hours.

Boot time
It takes around 1 minute and 10 seconds to boot the Apple Watch.